Cyber Monday sales (11/28/11)

Hi. I’m Lisa Leiter. Here’s your Chicago Business Today midday report. Stocks surging after their worst Thanksgiving week performance on record. Hopes for a solution to Europe’s debt crisis and a better than expected Black Friday are behind the rally. According to Chicago-based Shopper Trak, Black Friday sales rose 6.6 percent to a record 11.4 billion dollars. The 8.3 percent jump in sales from a year ago was the biggest since 2007, before the Great Recession forced consumers to pull back. Stores in the Midwest posted a 5.5% jump in revenue, just shy of the overall average. The shopping frenzy continues with Cyber Monday today but the question is how the rest of the holiday shopping season holds up: Retailers rely on the sales between Thanksgiving and Christmas for 20% of their annual sales, according to ShopperTrak. But other big shopping days from now through December also must post big numbers to make the overall season a success. One retailer Sears – has more than holiday sales to think about today. An Illinois Hous panel is set to vote this afternoon on a bill designed to keep the retailer and Chicago’s trading exchanges from moving their headquarters out of state. The latest version of the bill filed late yesterday keeps the tax breaks for Sears and CME Group but cuts back on savings that had been proposed for other groups. The price tag for the bill had ballooned to more than $800 million a year and the slimmed down version would cost the state about $250 million. It remains to be seen whether the bill has enough votes to clear the full House and Senate. Another setback to the federal FutureGen effort. Ameren is pulling out of the Future Gen 2.0 clean coal project. The St. Louis based power company is in talks to sell parts of its Meredosia power plant to the FutureGen Alliance, a group of coal-mining companies and utilities. The Alliance on Monday confirmed that estimated costs of retrofitting the old oil-fired power plant had skyrocketed since the plan was first unveiled. The original FutureGen plant was larger and more ambitious, but the Bush administration killed it over cost concerns after Illinois won the right to host the plant. Sen. Richard Durbin led the effort to revive the project, resulting in the scaled-back FutureGen 2.0 plan. And finally, And that’s this edition of Chicago Business Today. For more on all of these stories and for all of your local business headlines, be sure to stick with chicagobusiness.com. Thanks for watching, we’ll see you tomorrow.